Swimming to Cambodia

by Spalding Gray

  Elizabeth Becker told me the same thing. She was reporting for the Washington Post and a colleague of hers was killed by the Khmer Rouge in the house they lived in. She felt remorse for her colleague but also an enormous sense of being alive. She told me about it as we sat on the steps of her Washington house drinking white wine, eating pate with white bread. And I was listening but I wasn’t looking at her. Instead I was watching some black ants crawl across the brick walk to eat this small piece of pate that had fallen there. And into my frame of vision came Elizabeth’s hand, holding a white linen napkin. She just reached down and wiped out the entire trail of ants with one sweep of her hand. I appeared to be listening to her but inside I was weeping, oh my God, all those ants, all those innocent ants dead for no reason at all.

  Now what I had to say in my scene with Sam was simple—it was a little technical, but simple: “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of coordinates. Seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a homing beacon right in the middle of town. Check it out, Sid.”

  All right. Simple enough . . . for some actors. But this actor needs images for technical words like that. I have to build my own internal film, you see, or I can’t remember the words.

  By the way, I played one of those American officials who flew into Neak Luong. We were at an old garbage dump that they had made into Neak Luong, right outside Bangkok. The assistant director said, “Would the artists please get on the choppers.” Now there is no way I would ordinarily get on a helicopter, but he called me an artist and hop, hop, I was right on that chopper like Pavlov’s dog. They said it was only going to go up ten feet and then just land. All they needed was a shot of the embassy officials jumping off the choppers.

  So I got on the helicopter and it went BRRRRRRRRR—straight up. Straight up above this incredible jungle. I felt like I was in a movie, like I was in Apocalypse Now, and then I realized that I was in a movie! They were filming me, and I had no fear, even though the door was wide open and I was looking down. Craig T. Nelson was practically falling out the door—we had no safety belts—but I suddenly had no fear because the camera eroticizes the space! It protects you like Colgate Guard-All. Even if the chopper crashed, at least there would be rushes, right? My friends could show them on New Year’s Eve at the Performing Garage.

  We went up six times and the feeling was triumphant. I was looking up the Chao Phraya River and I saw, my God, how much area the film controlled! Twenty square miles of Thai jungle, all the way up the river, there were Thai peasants throwing more rubber tires on the fire to make black smoke, to make it look like war, and I thought, of course! WAR THERAPY. Every country should make a major war movie every year. It would put a lot of people to work, help them get their rocks off. And when you land in that jungle you don’t have to Method-act. When those helicopter blades are whirring overhead, you shout to be heard. You don’t have to Method-act when you look down and see a Thai peasant covered with chicken giblets and fake blood in 110-degree weather for fifteen hours a day for five dollars a day. (If they’re real amputees they get seven-fifty.) It’s just like the real event!

  So, “a computer malfunctioned.” I had an image of a computer in my mind, spaghetti coming out of it—a malfunction. “Put out the wrong coordinates . . .,” for coordinates I had an image of an oscillator from a seventh-grade science project, I don’t remember who had one, but it was a grid-work oscillator. “It seems a single B-52 . . .,” I remembered B-52S from many drunken dinners in front of the TV during That War. “Opened up over Neak Luong . . .,” I was having trouble with Neak Luong. It was a night shoot and I was a little hung over. At times I was calling it Luong Neak. I was a little shaky from that heavy party the night before, and the dose of marijuana and booze. But I didn’t feel too bad about it because Roland told me that my character would be drinking a lot because he was very guilty. So I thought, to some extent, I was in character. You would be amazed at what some people went through to get in character for this film. For instance, John Malkovich seemed to be in character all the time. He was the same on camera as off, and I couldn’t figure it out. So I went to him and asked him, “John, are you one of those actors who are in character all the time?” And he just said, “No, Spalding, not at all.” I was a little confused but I finally figured out that John Malkovich’s character was the kind of character who would say he wasn’t in character when he really was.

  There was one British actor, a suburban guy from outside London with a wife and family, who seemed to be living his character in the streets of Bangkok. He was convinced that his character would fall in love with a Mamasan, one of the women who run dance halls in Pat Pong. So he did. He started to actually fall in love with one, and to believe that he ran the night club with her. And then he started thinking that he would stay behind after the film was finished and open his own club in Pat Pong. His wife kept calling up, asking, “Where’s my husband?” At last she said, “You got him over there, you get him back.” It took four people to get him on that plane back to London. He said it wasn’t until he was halfway back that he realized he’d gone mad.

  “Okay, boys and girls, let’s go. Take sixty-four.”

  It was a night shoot and we were up to take sixty-four. And it was just the first scene of the night. I thought I had it down. “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of coordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a ...” and I couldn’t get the image of the homing beacon. I said, “There’s a housing device right in the middle of town.”

  “CUT. Okay, let’s go back. Keep it together now.”

  I don’t know why I was feeling under so much pressure. I had already done my worst scene. It was one that was cut from the film, in which 888 Thai marching troops passed in front of what was supposed to be Lon Nol’s reviewing stand. They were real Thai army troops playing Cambodians, and when the drummer got to my shoulder I was to be seen leaking information to Sam Waterston. When the drummer got to my shoulder I missed my cue. In 110 degrees, 888 troops had to march all the way back. It took about twenty minutes. Then Sam missed a cue. Then something went wrong with the camera. It took six takes, and by the sixth take, far into the day, I saw these troops coming at me and an insidious voice inside me was whispering, “You’re going to miss it, you’re going to miss it, you’re going to miss it.” Now who is that voice? And what is that voice? That’s all I want to know.

  “Okay, boys and girls, let’s go. Take sixty-five.”

  “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of coordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Luong . . . over Neak ... sorry.”

  “All right, Spalding. Take sixty-six.”

  At last I had the image for homing beacon. I saw a pigeon, a homing pigeon, flying toward a lighthouse beacon in a children’s storybook. Got it.

  “Let’s go. Take sixty-six.”

  “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of coordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a . . .” and I knew it would work. It didn’t matter what I was thinking, so long as I was thinking something. Because everyone looking at the film would be thinking their own thoughts and projecting them on me

  “There’s a homing beacon right in the middle of town. Check it out, Sid.”

  The entire crew burst into applause. Sixty-six takes later and five hours into the night we had finished the first scene of the evening. And I was told that it would cost $30,000 to process it, including the cost of the film and crew. Then, when I got back to New York, I was called in to redub the entire scene anyway, because of the sound of crickets. So what you hear in the film is my voice in New York City, reacting to some black-and-white footage shot one hot summer night on the Gulf of Siam.

  A private car was waiting for us and Renée and I were driven back to the Pleasure Prison. As we rode along I was thinking, “Why do I feel so inflated, so pumped up, so on edge? I have been here eight weeks and worked only eight days.” I mean, talk about mad dogs and Englishmen
, the British were incredible. A sixty-year-old makeup man stood for hours each day in the burning sun, just to press ice packs on our necks so we wouldn’t faint, and I was complaining? I was feeling ravaged, all spoiled and puffed up. But, oh, how I was going to miss it. How I was going to miss it.

  Riding in the car, I said a silent farewell. Farewell to the fantastic breakfasts, the pineapple like I’d never tasted and probably never will taste again. Farewell to the fresh mango and papaya, farewell to the Thai maid and the fresh, clean, cotton sheets on the king-size bed every night. Farewell to the incredible free lunches under the circus tent with fresh meat flown in from America every day. Roast lamb, roast potatoes and green beans at 110 degrees, in accordance with British Equity. Farewell to the cakes and teas and ices at four. Farewell to the Thai driver with the tinted glasses and the Mercedes with the one-way windows. Farewell to the single fresh rose in the glass on my bureau every morning.

  And just as I was dozing off in the Pleasure Prison, I had a flash. An inkling. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that killed Marilyn Monroe.

  part two

  So I told Renée that I would be back by the eighth of July or as soon as I had a Perfect Moment, whichever occurred first.

  Now, I thought it would be all right, I thought I would be able to make it back, but . . . all of a sudden I realized I had an open ticket on the airplane, and the last time I had an open ticket was in 1976 when I was in India, and I was almost hospitalized for not being able to make up my mind.

  I thought I had grown up since then, I thought I had developed my choice-maker, but the same thing happened again and I thought, now I’m in this part of the world, I’m in Thailand, and how many times will I ever be here again? What should I do? Well, maybe I should go to China, was the first thing that came to mind. And I pictured myself hitchhiking through China. Then I thought, no, I’d maybe get stuck on some tour of the cities and it would be hot and it would be crowded—maybe Nepal. I would get up there in the mountains—then I thought, too landlocked, down to Bali, maybe. So I had a kind of China-Nepal-Bali triangle going in my mind, and I would keep taking my ticket to the woman who was in charge of transportation on the film, and I would say, “Barbara, I think I’m going to be going to China.”

  “Well, Spalding,” she’d say, “I think you’ve got to go get a visa, and—why don’t you just take the ticket? If you have trouble making up your mind, you deal with it. You’ve come to us enough.”

  Around about that time, while I was going through the different triangles, I went to the Art Department video viewing room in the hotel (where we could do all of our homework, see Cambodia Year Zero or any other videotapes about Cambodia we wanted to see), and watched a videotape called Going Back. It’s about four veterans who go back to Hanoi on Christmas of 1981. They had been over originally to kill people, and now they were going back to make friends.... This was a fascinating tape. Tom Bird was one of the veterans in it, and he was also acting in The Killing Fields.

  Now, I was really taken by the tape, not so much by the Amerasian children in the streets, although they were beautiful, or the people who were suffering in the hospitals from the effects of Agent Orange, but I was taken by the fact that Hanoi was filled with bicycles. I had never seen a city like it. The only sound to be heard was the sound of wind through bicycle spokes. And I thought, now there’s where I’d like to go for my vacation. At least I wouldn’t be a tourist there.

  And I was beginning to feel more and more like “The Little Drummer Girl.” I really wanted to be a real foreign correspondent, not someone playing one.

  So I went to Tom Bird and asked, “What are our chances of going to Vietnam?” And he said, “We could will it. We could do it! We could do it if we put our minds to it. The best thing, Spalding, is to start off by going down to the Vietnamese embassy.”

  Now, I had been to the American embassy and I was very intimidated by it, because the air conditioning was so central that I couldn’t tell where the cooling was coming from. There was no draft, it was just like sitting in this big cool glass block with beautiful flame trees outside the window. The Vietnamese embassy was not so modern. It was just down the road, but in contrast to the American embassy it was a lot like a very clean Polish men’s room. It was very sparse and very simple—there was no furniture. Well, the only piece of furniture was in the main room and it was this beautiful teak table that we all sat around to talk with the embassy official. This table was exquisite. They must have rescued it from the bombing. On the surface there was a hand-carved, three-dimensional relief of elephants tearing down teak trees with their trunks in order to make the table—so, you see, it was a reflective table—it told a story about itself. In fact, it was doubly reflective, even reflexive, because it had a piece of glass over it and every so often I would catch a reflection of myself in the glass. I was wearing a blue cotton Thai peasant outfit from the Thai cottage industries, and the embassy official said, “They will like you very much in Hanoi with that outfit on.”

  The Vietnamese official really listened to us, whereas the American ambassador had kind of pontificated. This Vietnamese official was really curious about what Tom Bird and I wanted to do in Vietnam, and he asked us to write a letter to Hanoi laying out our proposal. He said, “First, before we begin our talk, could you please tell me—I’ve heard now that America has Vietnam on ‘back burner.’ Could you translate what means this ‘back burner,’ hm? Are we burning up?”

  Tom, who is very politic, answered, “No—no. Look at it this way. Now, say you have some rice and you have some coffee. You guys are the rice and Central America is the coffee. And what we’re doing is we’re talking about putting the rice on the back burner to keep it warm because we want to heat up the coffee on the front.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, thank you very much. That explains that.”

  Then Tom said, “Now I would like you to meet America’s number one Autobiographic Storyteller, Mr. Spalding Gray.”

  “Ah. Very pleased to meet you. Have you been on TV?”

  I didn’t know which way to go with this one. I didn’t want to tell him right off that I didn’t even own a television, particularly since I’d heard that NBC, CBS and ABC were going to be reporting from the streets of Hanoi come spring (providing that they’d agree to leave all their satellite equipment behind for the Vietnamese). And I was sure the Vietnamese wanted the American public at large to know certain things about Vietnam. So I thought, well, maybe I’d better go with it. I said, “I’m not on TV yet, but I’ve got it on the back burner, actually.”

  The David Letterman Show is interested. Every so often Jerry Mulligan, one of David’s reps (and the son of an Irish cop from Cranston, Rhode Island), calls me up to find out how I’m doing: “David wants to know what’s going on with that funny guy behind the table downtown. And he wants to know, Spalding, if you could say something funny to me over the phone.”

  “What was that?”

  “David wants you to say something funny over the phone to me right now, so I can tell it to him.”

  So I’ve got it on the back burner.

  So, we decided that if it worked out, we would go to Vietnam. And I was able to reassure Renée, through Tom (Tom did it actually).

  He just went to Renée and said in his deep, confident, assertive voice, “Renée, Spalding and I are going to Hanoi together and I will have him back in Krummville by July 8.” And Renée said to me, “Why can’t you talk like that? Take a lesson from Tom. Even if you don’t mean it, at least you could say it and put me at ease. I mean, I’ve got a twenty-four hour flight ahead of me. It would be nice to go home with some sense of when I’ll see you again. Write me a letter later but give me a break now, please.”

  Renée and I made up and we said a fond farewell outside the gates of the Pleasure Prison. I’d made up my mind to stay with Tom. After all, maybe Thailand would be the right place to have a Perfect Moment. I had heard that the next location was in Phuket, where they had a lot of
magic mushrooms, so if I didn’t have an organic Perfect Moment, I could always induce one. Why not? And I would use Tom Bird as my Magic Will Carpet. I would leave as soon as he left, and we would either go to Vietnam or fly home together. He had a few more scenes in the film but I was finished. I had finished my last big scene of sixty-six takes, and now I was going to hang on until Tom finished his last scene. So I asked if I could travel with the company down to Phuket, which is this beautiful island in the Indian Ocean, off the southern coast of Thailand. They were going to film location shots at a Coca-Cola factory there, where Sidney Schanberg was supposed to have first seen the Khmer Rouge. (Actually, he first saw them at a Pepsi factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, but they couldn’t find a Pepsi factory in Phuket, so they settled for Coke.)

  Transportation told me that I could come along, but that I couldn’t have my own driver anymore; I could go on the “Artists’ Bus.”

  I got on the bus early in the morning. It was supposed to be a fifteen-hour trip, and we were told that maybe we would be stopped by bandits or Thai police. It would be more likely that the Thai army would rob us. The only road to Phuket was a dirt road, a dirt road through this jungle.

  When I got on the bus I didn’t see any Artists, so I wasn’t really sure whether I was on the right bus or not. But there was an interesting bunch of people I’d never been with before. Uberto Pasolini of the Pasolini film-and-banking family from Rome: twenty-eight years old and had dropped out of the family business to carry orangeade for the film. He wanted to work his way up from the bottom and eventually become a film producer. He was sitting in the very front seat of this kind of old, ’50s Greyhound bus; sitting in the very front seat, looking out, pretending his head was a camera and doing pans with his eyes of this meaningless jungle. He was happy.